Why Did Petah Coyne’s Work Make Me Cry?

Eleven years ago, I wept openly in the middle of Petah Coynes touring survey “Above and Beneath the Skin.” Within compulsory, regulated social systems the ones that determine what options are available for a subject’s action and identification uncontrolled crying is a breach of those mores, a breakdown and demonstration of the effects of life

Read More


Brian Dettmer: Paging Through Time

How can history, memory, and cultural knowledge become the materials of sculpture? In Brian Dettmer’s hands, books that have lost their original function do just that. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference volumes represent the physicality of gathered knowledge with their moving pages, solid bindings, and words and illustrations.

Read More


Taryn Simon: The Spectacle of Loss

In the fall of 2016, Taryn Simon presented a unique interactive work, An Occupation of Loss, at the Park Avenue Armory in collaboration with Artangel, London. (Loss, in the work’s title, represents the fugitive nature of things, a theme that runs through all of Simon’s work.)

Read More


Konstantinos Stamatiou: In Praise of Junk

Greek-born sculptor Konstantinos Stamatiou, who divides his time between Athens and New York, works with throwaway materials such as plastic, Styrofoam, and cut drinking straws, following the path established by Arte Povera, in which a “poor art” is constructed of humble elements (Jannis Kounellis, a sculptor of Greek origin, is an important practitioner of Arte

Read More


Fighting Gravity: A Conversation with Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2017. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Tony Cragg’s new works – contortions of wood, metal, and stone perfectly manipulated by man and machine – represent a kind of beauty as close to nature and as far removed from Modernist

Read More